Spotify plays matchmaker with new apps that find your musical mate

Spotify has kept busy filling up its music app platform, and today it has two new, very interesting tools. Tastebuds and Fellody have been added to the Spotify mix with the intention of finding you a like-minded music mate.

“Both apps seamlessly integrate with Spotify to help you connect with new friends or potential dates with similar music tastes,” says Spotify. “Based on your favorite artists, most-listened to music, and your Spotify playlists, the apps consider your taste in music from Spotify’s huge catalog of over 17 million songs to match you with your potential soulmate.”

Lofty ambitions for a music app. So I had to put them to the test.

Fellody easily has the better user interface and is a more visual way to experience music matchmaking. You can sort your matches by sexual orientation, location, age, and a few other (less important) qualifiers (and yes, my number one match appears to have something resembling blood all over his neck… not sure what this says about me). Fellody also lets you view your potential significant other by top artists, so if you want to see who else really loves the most popular artists on the app, you’re in luck.

You can message or “flirt” with matches, the Spotify equivalent of a Facebook poke it seems. The one hiccup with Fellody is that you can’t stay within the Spotify client to create your own profile, and while you’re using the app with the music player you really don’t know what your own profile looks like to the users that are matched with you. You have to login to the Fellody site (which was more difficult than you’d imagine – clicking the “Connect with Facebook” icon doesn’t auto-log you in) in order to see what exactly you’re showing to potential matches.

Tastebuds is an altogether simpler system (and a little lackluster). After scanning your Spotify library it brings you to one page where you can filter results and send messages.

So what about the revealed matches? There were a surprising amount in my area, which is saying something (I’m not sitting in the middle of New York or San Francisco, so this type of crowd-sourced application doesn’t always work).

This is definitely an interesting use of Spotify data, but there are so many improvements I keep waiting for from the service rather than app updates. A better predictive music tool is much-needed, as is some more variety in the new releases category. And how about giving us some way to interact within the music player? That endless ribbon of our friends’ listening activity is interesting but there’s no way to comment or communicate with them from there.

All that said, good for Spotify for keeping up its app strategy, and for introducing something users haven’t really seen in a popular music player – it also keeps in line with the service’s social strategy. Props to Spotify for flexing some creative muscles with these new features, but what users really want is a better overall music experience — so keep the firmware upgrades coming.